Seth Dillingham is riding in the Pan-Mass Challenge, a 192-mile bike ride to raise money for cancer research. He’s arranged for some terrific bundles of Mac software (and other bundles for Windows users) that are being auctioned on eBay. The winning bidders get fully-licensed copies of great apps like BBEdit, NetNewsWire, and OmniOutliner, and the money goes to cancer research.

Thursday, 29 September 2005

Apple Computer confirmed to eWEEK.com on Thursday that some Mac
Minis currently being sold may indeed be faster and more
powerful than labeled, with better processors and some improved
peripheral features than is marked on the outside of the box.

Venerable S/FTP client gets compatibility improvements with obscure FTP servers, support for more text encodings, additional localizations, and a PDF version of the user manual. Update: A quick update fixes a few bugs in yesterday’s 5.0.3 release.

Wednesday, 28 September 2005

Neato new web app (in “beta”, of course) built on top of the Yahoo Search API. You create searchrolls, which are lists of up to 25 domain names, and then your search results are constrained to those domains. I created one called “Mac Nerdery” if you want to try it out.

Rollyo’s overall UI is quite good, including a distinctive look and feel, a very clear and well-organized layout, and a healthy sprinkling of Ajax. The sign-up process for creating a new account is painless.

Complements aside, I must say it’s unclear to me whether Rollyo provides any actual advantage over a regular Internet-wide search.

So, here it is. Here’s what I think will quickly become Mac OS
X’s most glaring technical limitation, and what could lead to
another Copland-style disaster if Apple isn’t careful. Here’s
what Mac OS X is missing today that will be very difficult to
add later without causing big problems for existing software
and developers:

Tim O’Reilly has an op-ed in today’s New York Times regarding the Authors Guild suit against the Google Library Project. Perfect summary of why the Authors Guild, and any authors who supports their suit, are wrong.

Update: I’ve changed the link to point to O’Reilly’s hosted version of essay, which contains a bit of extra commentary and an extra paragraph that was cut because of space constraints. Sort of like a director’s cut for op-eds.

Tuesday, 27 September 2005

Macworld UK reports on Apple’s response to the Nano screen situation.
The outright broken displays are apparently a “vendor quality problem
in a small number of units”, and affected Nanos will be replaced under
warranty. But the scratching issue is, according to Apple, hype:

The [Apple] representative confirmed the company to have
received “very few” calls claiming such a problem, adding: “The
iPod Nano is made with the same high-quality polycarbonate
plastic as the fourth-generation iPod.

Think Secret reports on the updated Mac Minis: 1.5 GHz processors, 5400-RPM hard drives, 64 MB of VRAM (up from 32), and Bluetooth 2.0 support lead the list of changes. Interestingly, they’re apparently appearing in boxes marked with the old specs; according to Think Secret:

Sources have informed Think Secret that Mac Mini box labels
will continue to list the older specifications with no
indication of whether the newer or older systems are contained
within. The motivation behind this is to help clear current
inventory without lowering prices. Essentially, customers are
promised that the Mac Mini they purchase will have
specifications “at least” equal to the label, but that their
system may exceed those. Customers who purchase a new Mac Mini
to find they ended up with the older configuration will not be
able to return the system in the hopes of getting the newer
configuration without paying a restocking fee.

Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of world-wide product marketing, said a “vendor quality problem” caused cracking on a small number of iPod-nano screens, affecting “less than one-tenth of 1%” of the devices Apple has shipped. Mr. Schiller said Apple’s iPod-nano warranty will cover devices with cracked screens.

In other words, the [Authors Guild] believes that Google
shouldn’t be allowed to opt writers in to its Google Print
program (which will make money for writers and sell more
books), but they believe that they should be able to opt
writers into their costly, suicidal lawsuit against Google,
which, if they are victorious, will reduce sales and take money
out of writers’ pockets.

Raising the storage limit to a gigabyte, while laudable, is basically playing catch-up to where online Web storage stood a few years ago. And the other improvements, while not offensive, still don’t do what, in my estimation, should be done: turning .Mac into a fully-fledged Web 2.0 offering.

The quality of Apple’s web apps is well below the quality of their Mac software.

All, right, I’m sick of people reporting that Mac OS X is
‘mostly’ virus-free. It is, as far has been proven, ENTIRELY
virus-free. Macs are not magical, and one day there will be
virus that infects them. However, I don’t think it’s happened
yet, and I think it’s time we, the Mac community, started
saying, “No, we don’t have any viruses.”

Seriously, if a reporter asked you, “Hey, do you have herpes?”
and you replied, “Nope, I’ve been tested, no herpes, never,”
and then they wrote an article with the headline, “Bob Smith:
Mostly Herpes-Free,” you would, no doubt, flip (assuming your
name was Bob Smith).

Apple’s documentation regarding the version of Mac OS included with each model Macintosh indicates there’s a “Sept 2005” update to the Mac Mini that ships with Mac OS X 10.4.2 build 8D40; the current publicly-released build of 10.4.2 is 8C46.

Motorola CEO Ed Zander had some harsh words for the nano in a recent interview.

“Screw the Nano,” said Zander. “What the hell does the Nano do? Who listens to 1,000 songs? People are going to want devices that do more than just play music, something that can be seen in many other countries with more advanced mobile phone networks and savvy users,” he said.

Wow, what a dope.

Sunday, 25 September 2005

Unlockupd works around a bug in lookupd, a system service which is
required for proper operation of Mac OS X. If lookupd fails, the system
quickly becomes unusable. Unlockupd periodically checks lookupd’s status
and forces it to restart should it fail.

If you’re afflicted by the recently-publicized lookupd system-wide freezes, this should serve as a temporary fix until Apple truly fixes the bug. It’s easy to install, and easy to uninstall. (Via MDJ 2005.09.23.)

The second man Mr. Allchin tapped was Amitabh Srivastava, now 49, a fellow purist among computer scientists. A newcomer to the Windows group, Mr. Srivastava had his team draw up a map of how Windows’ pieces fit together. It was 8 feet tall and 11 feet wide and looked like a haphazard train map with hundreds of tracks crisscrossing each other.

Saturday, 24 September 2005

Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. not only wants variable-priced songs on ITMS (and other online stores), but also seems to think they’re entitled to some of the profits from iPod sales:

“We are selling our songs through iPod, but we don’t have a
share of iPod’s revenue,” he said. “We want to share in those
revenue streams. We have to get out of the mindset that our
content has promotional value only.

Wil Shipley put out a weblog post pooh-poohing unit testing; Michael Tsai’s retort is just terrific. (The Wikipedia, as usual, has a good entry on “Unit Testing” if you need background info.) Gus Mueller’s explanation about how he uses unit testing with VoodooPad pretty much aptly describes how I use it while developing Markdown.

Friday, 23 September 2005

Mike Matas shits all over the icons for OmniOutliner 3. This is from back in February, but I just caught it via Jon Rentzsch. Fights about icons tend to be incredibly nasty and personal, and I’m not quite sure why.

You might say that Perl grew out of the Cold War. I’ve often told
the story about how Perl was invented at a secret lab that was
working on a secret NSA project, so I won’t repeat that here,
since it’s no secret. Some of you have heard the part about my
looking for a good name for Perl, and scanning through
/usr/dict/words for every three- and four-letter word with
positive connotations. Though offhand, I can’t explain how I
missed seeing Ruby. So anyway, I ended up with “Pearl” instead.

But it’s a little known fact that one of the three-letter names I
considered for quite a while was the word “spy.” […]

But wouldn’t “Spy” be a great name to give to a language whose
purpose was pattern matching and reporting? Hmm. And spies are
also called “agents of change.” “Practical extractions are one of
our specialties.”

Instead of a warn operator, it’d have to be the warn off
operator. Instead of having a die operator, we might have had the
let die operator. Then we’d get Perl poetry, I mean, Spy poetry,
with phrases like live or let die.

Thursday, 22 September 2005

Brent Simmons points to reports on MacFixIt and Apple’s discussion forums showing that people are getting system-wide lock-ups after while using web browsers; anecdotal evidence seems to point in the direction of some bad interaction between lookupd and Apple’s most recent Java update. I haven’t seen any problems like this personally, but then again, I haven’t installed the latest Java update, either.

Wednesday, 21 September 2005

With opt out, the interests of the public, the authors, and the publishers are all protected. The public gets an amazing utility, the ability to find which books contain the desired information as easily as they can now find web content; readers, authors and publishers all get a windfall as search helps people find books that are currently completely ignored by both publishers and retailers. And if some forgotten gem gets discovered, and the copyright holder isn’t convinced that Google Print’s revelation of the book is enough reason to keep it in the index, and they want to monetize it in some other way, they can opt out! What more can you ask for?

Tuesday, 20 September 2005

Most importantly, Backup now performs additive incremental
archives, which means that (a) it keeps old copies of files when
they change, so that you can choose which one you want when it
comes time to restore; and (b) it copies only new or changed
files — not every single file — when performing a backup.

Which interface, FontExplorer X’s or Suitcase’s, works better?
Which is more attractive? Toss a coin. Both interfaces are
bone-simple to understand, and both look great — FontExplorer X
looks like Suitcase morphed with iTunes. Both programs make it
easy to create and manage collections, but FontExplorer X
additionally lets you create smart collections, a la iTunes
smart playlists; and FontExplorer X provides one-click shopping
for Linotype fonts.

Today Google informed me that I’m not allowed to use the word
“Mac” in ad copy.

I’ve heard from a few other Mac developers who got the same message
from Google this morning. This is nuts; if a Mac developer
can’t use the word “Mac”, how can they possibly advertise with Google?
What are they supposed to do, spell it “M*c”, like it’s a dirty word?

The big question is whether Apple is behind this. If so, why? If not,
why is Google doing this?

Opera has released their web-browser free of ads and free of charge. They’re concentrating on revenue from searches initiated from the browser (e.g., I suppose, Amazon affiliate revenue). Here’s a Reuters story with more info.

Monday, 19 September 2005

Wil Shipley looked into using the JPEG2000 image format for (the currently in development) Delicious Library 2.0, but found it to be way too much slower than JPEG. He also praises the performance of Tiger’s new Core Graphics routines for creating thumbnails.

Many of you have asked for the list of WebKit bugs fixed in
Safari 2.0.1.

First the disclaimers: This list does not include any changes to
Safari the app, only to the open source components
(WebKit/WebCore/JavaScriptCore). Also, it only includes the
changes made from the 10.4.2 software update to the Safari 2.0.1
update, not any earlier fixes. And finally, we don’t necessarily
promise to do this for future updates, but we might.

Sunday, 18 September 2005

Nifty update to Buzz Andersen’s open-source Mac client for del.icio.us. New features include favicon support and, thanks to its new delicious: URL protocol, much-needed support for posting new bookmarks via web browser bookmarklets.

Wednesday, 14 September 2005

Jon Rentzsch on some interesting developer news from Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference: (a) type inferencing is coming to C# 3.0; and (b) Monad, Microsoft’s new command-line shell, is included in current beta builds of Vista.

The First Amendment does not give you the right to take anyone else’s intellectual property, remove two letters, and profit from it — especially when the owner of the intellectual property is already selling similar goods in a similar fashion, any more than Apple Computer would sit idly while someone sold “Crapple eyePod” players or accessories. People who work for 30 years to build a name and follow the law to protect it are not “humorless” because some asshole with a 30-second idea can’t make money off it without permission.

Pierre Igot’s astute criticism of the iTunes 5 source list. To me, the worst aspect is this one, from an aside:

(On a side note, deleting playlists and folders in iTunes cannot be undone, which is especially problematic since there is no warning dialog before iTunes deletes them. This is really an unacceptable limitation in 2005.)

Of less importance is the iPod Nano’s reliance on USB: it
cannot be synced via FireWire, although it can be charged via
FireWire. With USB 2.0 on all Mac models and all modern PCs,
this is but a footnote. (Older Mac owners with USB 1.1 gripe
because of the dramatically lower transfer speed; however, for
2 or 4 GB of storage, it’s a bit less of an issue than with a
full-scale iPod.)

I noticed on the day the Nano was announced that FireWire wasn’t
supported, but I didn’t know until now that it still worked for
charging. Anyone know the reason for this? My guess is that it’s about
saving space internally; that FireWire data support would entail
additional hardware inside the case, but that accepting a charge over
FireWire works “for free” with the Dock Connector port.

This is clever. Linotype, one of the world’s leading typeface foundries, has released a professional font management utility for Mac OS X — and it’s free. They’re going to make money by selling their own fonts through the app, iTunes-style. In fact, judging by the screenshots, the app itself looks rather iTunes-like. However, it’s iTunes 4.9 that it looks like, which means it already looks dated.

Jason Santa Maria speculates that they could open this up to selling fonts from other foundries as well. Update: Be sure to read through the comments on Santa Maria’s post; lots of details and first impressions from people who are trying it out. Looks like a winner. If you haven’t tried using professional font managers on Mac OS X, you don’t know how important FontExplorer might be.

Tuesday, 13 September 2005

Neither Apple nor DashboardWidgets.com will list any widgets related to P2P software. I can understand Apple’s perspective, but it baffles me why an indie site like DashboardWidgets.com would have a policy like this. They’ll happily list useless do-nothing decorative widgets, but won’t list useful widgets that can possibly be used for copying bits that some people don’t want copied.

Something kind of photo-sharing software from Microsoft — I think it’s more or less a cross between iPhoto and Flickr. Nice-looking software and web site — by far the best-looking section on Microsoft.com.

For the last 7 years, you’ve been able to record and playback TiVo’d shows and save them as long as you wanted or had space. Now, outsiders are telling your TiVo when to delete themselves whether you like it or not.

TiVo is starting to screw over their loyal customer base so they can bend over and take it from the entertainment industry.

SiliconValley.com is hosting a roundtable discussion this week about Apple’s future. I’m one of the panelists; others include Brent Simmons, Tim Bray, and Andy Hertzfeld. It’s a web-based forum; we’ll be posting there throughout the week.

Jobs was proposing to fix something that decidedly was not broken. “Not very many companies are bold enough to shoot their best-selling product at the peak of its popularity,” Gartner analyst Van Baker says. “That’s what Apple just did.” And it did that while staring right down the barrels of the holiday retail season.

So why is FatBits the title of my blog? Aside from the obvious nostalgia trip and old school Mac cred, I think it’s good fit for my personality, and my writing style here at Ars. I spent a lot of time in FatBits as a kid. I am (and was, even at ten years old) the kind of person who’s not satisfied until every single pixel is just so.

Friday, 9 September 2005

Rui Carmo has an animated GIF illustrating a new feature in iTunes 5: when you hold the Command key, you get expanded tooltips with additional information. (Update: Apparently it’s not new to iTunes 5, it’s just that neither Rui nor I had ever noticed it in previous versions.)

And it’s certainly true that financial interests of the three
collaborators — Apple, Motorola and Cingular — have hog-tied
the Rokr in a lot of unnecessary ways. The phone would be so
much better if it held more music, let you buy songs directly
online and let you use songs as ring tones.

If you’re looking for an iPod phone, in other words, the Rokr
isn’t it; it stands no chance of living up to the
hyperventilating hype of the last few weeks. But as an iTunes
phone — the only one on earth that lets you carry subsets of
your Apple store-bought music on errands and other short
missions — the Rokr is great-sounding, reasonably priced and a
lot of fun.

Thursday, 8 September 2005

But every one trying to crack the iPod’s dominance is missing a really important point: Third Party Hardware Developers. The iPod has scads of hardware developers cranking out toys at a furious pace, the other guys have none. The reason for it is pretty obvious if you think about it. Developing for the iPod is dead simple compared to the other folks.

Have you become one with CSS? Does your typical website critique include View Source?

If you are an expert at developing high performance, standards-compliant interactive web pages using XHTML/CSS/JavaScript and have experience working with large-scale content management or e-commerce systems, we want to talk to you!

This latest iPod was publicly revealed yesterday at a
razzle-dazzle marketing event orchestrated by Apple CEO Steve
Jobs. But I have been testing a Nano for the past few days, and
I am smitten. It’s not only beautiful and incredibly thin, but
I found it exceeds Apple’s performance claims.

In fact, the nano has the best combination of beauty and
functionality of any music player I’ve tested — including the
iconic original white iPod. And it sounds great. I plan to buy
one for myself this weekend, when it is due to reach stores in
the U.S., Europe and Asia.

Wednesday, 7 September 2005

Keen observation from Scott Stevenson. Cramped line-heights are one of my biggest personal peeves in web typography. In the print world, you often have to sacrifice line-height because paper is expensive, and/or because paper comes in fixed sized. Vertical pixels on web pages are free, however.

After 8 years working for Netscape and AOL, Mike Pinkerton is leaving to work for Google, where he’ll be getting to paid to work on Firefox.

So now let me address the large elephant in the corner: what oh
what does it mean for Camino now that Pink is going to work on
Firefox? The answer: only good things. Remember that Google
employees get 20% of their time to work on their own pet
projects. While some of that time will hopefully be spent
nurturing the growing Mac community within Google, a lot of
that time will be directly spent on Camino. That’s right, I’m
(indirectly) getting paid to keep working on it. That’s going
to be a big help with the push for 1.0 coming up this Fall. In
addition, just as Josh blogged not so many months ago, there is
plenty of Mac-specific work that benefits all Gecko browsers,
and now there’s one more Mac guy available to help out.

CTM Development, the company behind PowerMail, has released a desktop search tool built on top of Spotlight and CTM’s own FoxTrot search technology. Even though it uses Spotlight, it doesn’t depend on it, so they can support 10.3 and 10.2. (Although I seriously question how many people still holding on to 10.2 are buying new software for it.) FoxTrot is available now in beta, and licenses are on sale for €19 (the price will go up to €29 at some point in the future).

Wow, $4 per post. This explains why authors at Weblogs Inc. sites tend to post even when they obviously have nothing to post about. Hey, maybe with the new PayPal micropayments system, they could pay their authors on-the-fly.

Friday, 2 September 2005

You know how Google encourages its employees to spend 20 percent of their time working on their own personal projects? Google engineer Greg Miller built Gmail Notifier, a tiny Mac app that give you access to Gmail in your menu bar.

The app is small and nonintrusive, but hopefully still has all
the features a Mac user would want. With it you can: